The Gimp 2.4 was released today and it includes a number of new features, like scalable brushes, align tool, new selection tools, color Management and soft-proofing, Red Eye removal and much more. Unfortunately, there is still no 16bit per pixel support, which is useful for digital photography editing.

Of course it doesn't. Creating an application that is like some other one is by no means comparison to that other application. This is a huge difference. HUGE.

Do you actually know what the word "comparison" mean? Seems like you don't. Well, FYI, comparison in this context is when you take two applications and look what one of them can do and the other can't. Can you show me comparison betnween GIMP and Photoshop at gimp.org? Of course you can't.

Now let me tell you why I'm taking it so seriously. Most user requests traffic contains questions "Why can't you make GIMP look/act like Photoshop?" Main reason for that is because people think that GIMP is supposed to compete with Photoshop. They think so because people like you provide misleading information like yours "Since GIMP compares itself to Photoshop, directly comparing the features of the two programs is to be expected."

Please read carefully what actual developer of GIMP said not so long ago:

"Personally I do believe that it would be a major fault to define GIMP as “the same kind of application as Photoshop”, because that would only push the problem to the question “What kind of application is Photoshop?”. We need to define our goals but we should by all means avoid to define our goals in terms of competitors."